"Dave Darraugh & Hana Hillerova" After long employing baroque and rich imagery, Hana Hillerova has moved into the minimal with a group of systematic works. In glass sculptures, tubes of different lengths are attached with webs of wire. Their angular forms rest at sharp angles in loosely arranged but precarious structures; they catch the light in the gallery in continual patterns. Watercolor drawings of simple and colorful brushstrokes mimic chemical structures or crystal formations. The overall effect is that of a talented but jaded intellectual tinkering with the same formula over and over again. Former Houstonian and Idaho naturalist Dave Darraugh delivers offhand consumerist critiques in minimalist packages. Untitled (Hat Box) takes the artist's stance to its ultimate result — the painstakingly crafted, rough-hewn, all-white plaster mockup of a relic brings to mind immediate blankness. Through August 12. Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, 4520 Blossom, 713-863-7097. — SC

"Designed by Architects: Metalwork from the Margo Grant Walsh Collection" This exhibition is filled with beautiful, desirable objects drawn from Walsh's more than 800-piece collection. Looking at them on a scorching Houston summer day, you want to reach inside the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's vitrines, touch the cool, smooth silver and hold it to your brow. Walsh probably wouldn't mind — she's a down-to-earth collector. Pretentious, ornate decorative metalwork isn't her thing; these objects were designed to be used. Walsh is an acclaimed interior architect, and you can see her professional sensibilities and her pragmatic Midwestern upbringing in her collection. The objects are practical and functional as well as beautiful. The most appealingly tactile work in the collection is a 2003 coffee and tea service designed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishiwaza. Made by Alessi, the pieces of the set are chubby and rounded, irregularly shaped and reminiscent of pieces of fruit — pears, peaches, little melons. Also included is an Arts and Crafts period muffin dish by British architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee; George Henry Walton's 1910 copper Arts and Crafts mantel clock, which resembles the facade of a building; and architect Ettore Sottsass's 1981 silver-plated Murmansk Fruit Stand, a large bowl held aloft by gleaming zigzagged columns. Organized by Cindi Strauss, MFAH's curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts and design, this is a tight, beautifully installed show. Through August 3. 1001 Bissonnet, 713-639-7300. — KK

"Dramas: Real and Imagined" The artists of "Dramas" shine through a lackluster presentation and premise to enliven a corporate interstitial space with terror and dismay. This grouping of representational painters channels 21st-century cultural anxiety. Symbolist tendencies are evident in the paranoid world of Seth Alverson; in his self-portrait, he tries in vain to hold back a horde of tree limbs advancing through a door, his eyes wide with fear. Myla Bertinot's nocturnes are beautifully painted scenes of children, while Robert Jessup engages mythical archetypes in his large outdoor scenes of children playing on hills. Teresa Dunn dovetails with Jessup's mood while teasing the surreality out of daily life with her family scenes. Not all works in the show are actually figurative. Cheyenne Ramos crosses Sigmar Polke's conceptualism with dada collage by creating clip-art scenes on fields of vintage printed fabric. Berlin painter Jonathan Gold fashions passionate canvasses — rough, impressionist scenes of floodwaters and destruction that hit home in our Gulf clime. Jersey girl Angela Fraleigh steals the show with her baroque self-portraits bathed in a warm light and obscured by pools and drips of invigorating color. The viewer captures a glimpse of a violent or passionate moment, but the drama is left up to your imagination. Despite its location amid the hustle and bustle of a corporate lobby, this is a valuable collection of contemporary representational painting. Through July 25. Williams Tower, 2800 Post Oak, 713-553-5060. — SC

"The Old Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art" Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Senior Curator Toby Kamps organized this show, which brings together art that takes apart our country's self-constructed mythologies and Disney-fied versions of history. The works in the show sniff out the weirdness we've tried to culturally deodorize. Sam Durant's installation Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching (2006) features displays and worn-looking wax figures he purchased from the defunct Plymouth National Wax Museum in Massachusetts on a divided, slowly rotating circular platform. One side illustrates the famed story of how Native Americans taught the settlers to grow corn by fertilizing it with herring, while the tableau on the other side depicts Captain Miles Standish killing the Pequot man Pecksuot. Cynthia Norton, from Kentucky, land of Jack Daniel's, presents Fountain (Emotion) (2002), a supposedly working distillery. Norton has taken the redneck quest for booze and transformed it into an assemblage art object. Kara Walker is known for her appropriation of the genteel 19th-century pastime of silhouette making; her work addresses America's decidedly ungenteel history of slavery, using caricatured figures, both white and black. In her video 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005), a burly slave and a scrawny "master" engage in sodomy, and the master impregnates the slave with a cotton boll. Kamps has curated a fascinating exhibition that mines a rich and provocative vein of influence in contemporary American art – and culture. Leaving the CAMH, you look with fresh eyes at the weirdness all around you. Through July 20. 5216 Montrose Blvd., 713-284-8250. — KK